The Chin's Daughter Writes Tell-All Book

By Ed Scarpo
From the NY Daily News:

Rita Gigante was 16 years old before she found out she was a Mafia princess. Life with father, as she describes it in her new memoir “The Godfather’s Daughter: An Unlikely Story of Love, Healing and Redemption,” was far more rough than royal. Vincent Gigante famously wandered Greenwich Village in his bathrobe, passing himself off as a paranoid schizophrenic to fool the Feds. They knew him for what he was, the boss of the Genovese crime family, the reputed head of the Five Families of New York. Sentenced to 12 years, he died in jail in 2005. Here Rita tells of her own violent awakening to the truth and how she was forced to join the masquerade.
This excerpt is taken from the book THE GODFATHER’S DAUGHTER: An Unlikely Story of Love, Healing, and Redemption, by Rita Gigante and Natasha Stoynoff. It is published by Hay House (publication date: September 18, 2012) and available at all bookstores or online at: www.hayhouse.com.
I was now a 16-year-old tenth grader at Northern Valley Regional High School at Old Tappan and in no mood to hear that Tina, a popular girl — famous for her acid-washed jeans and over-gelled hair — was spreading rumors about my family. My best friend had heard her big mouth from down the hall.

“Tina’s talkin’ s--- again,” Madison told me during chemistry class. “She’s down the hall and is going around the whole school calling you — get this — a Mafia princess!”

Madison continued, breathlessly, “Tina’s telling everybody that your family is . . . connected.”

Something inside of me snapped. Maybe, I later imagined, it was Dad’s paranoid schizophrenia finally kicking in and taking over.

DAILY NEWS INTERVIEW: RITA GIGANTE SAYS 'THE CHIN' DANCED TO ELVIS IN HIS BATHROBE

See the full article here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular This Week

Hoodwinked: Restaurateur on Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares Was a Mobster

By Ed Scarpo
Image
Peter (Peter Pasta) Pellegrino, formerly of the Babylon, New York restaurant Peter’s Italian Restaurant, really is -- or was -- a gangster. Gordon gives a pep talk. Peter is ready for action..... The once-promising Bonanno crime family member who appeared in Kitchen Nightmares now calls himself a brokester . And the Bonanno crime family, with which he was once affiliated has disowned him. So has the rest of New York's Cosa Nostra, according to FBI documents and Peter Pasta himself. But before all that he appeared on an episode of Kitchen Nightmares in which he acted very much like the mobster he allegedly was trying to become around the time of filming. (See Peter's Italian Restaurant menu here .) Back then Peter Pasta was an up-and-coming Bonanno associate who "earned" $15 grand a week from bookmaking. At the time, he also owned two boats that he'd park in a pricey nearby Babylon harbor called Great South Bay. Gang Land News's Je
Read more

Who Killed Carmine Galante And Why: Weighing The Evidence (Series Conclusion)

By Ed Scarpo
Image
“ In the back, Sally! "                                               --(?) G etting sentenced to 20 years in prison on narcotics charges in 1962 was just about the worst possible thing that could happen to the ambitious Carmine Galante—short of, say, getting blasted in the face with shotguns while dining with amici stretti on the back patio of his favorite restaurant. 1980 Giuseppe Bono wedding: Phil Giaccone, Dom Trinchera, JB Indelicato, and Bruno Indelicato were major participants in Galante murders. Lilo spent most of the 1960s and almost half of the 1970s in various prisons. By the time he departed on parole, he was already “yesterday’s man,” as Adrian Humphreys and Lee Lamothe dubbed him in The Sixth Family: The Collapse of the New York Mafia and the Rise of Vito Rizzuto , adding: “Internationally, the underworld had realigned in his (Galante's) absence: the French Connection, along with Galante’s Corsican and French colleagues in Europe and Canada, was unraveling. The
Read more

Joseph Anthony Colombo Jr. Dies at Age 67

By Ed Scarpo
Image
Joseph Anthony Colombo Jr. Joseph A. Colombo Junior, affectionately known as "Pop," died on October 29, 2014 at his home in Newburgh, New York. He was 67. He's survived by his wife, Diane, and kids Dina, Denise, and Joe. He died following a long battle with Neurological Lyme Disease, according to one news report . Joe Junior was among Joseph Colombo Senior's five children, which also includes sons Christopher, Anthony and Vincent. Visitation will be held from 2 to 4 and 6 to 8 p.m. on Monday, November 3rd at Brooks Funeral Home, 481 Gidney Ave., Newburgh. A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated by Rev. William Scafidi at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, November 4th at St. Mary's Church, Newburgh. Burial will follow in Calvary Cemetery, New Windsor. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that memorial donations be made in Joseph's name to Hospice of Orange and Sullivan Counties, 800 Stony Brook Ct., Newburgh, NY 12550 or to Lyme Research Alliance, 20
Read more

Who Really Killed Tommy Two-Guns DeSimone?

By Ed Scarpo
Image
It's one of gangland's most high-profile, enigmatic hits -- and the identity of the killer has been debated for decades. Joe Pesci immortalized a vicious killer in Goodfellas. Thomas "Tommy Two-Guns" DeSimone killed a made member of  the Mafia  -- and for that, among other things, he was killed in what's been described as a classic setup. The truth is, we know very little about this murder, including who pulled the trigger. (Or fired up the chainsaw, depending on who you believe). DeSimone disappeared, meaning there's zero evidence as to how he was killed; in fact, it can't be said with absolute certainty that he was killed. Still, he was killed . Guys like him don't just disappear into thin air.  They'd never leave New York because everything they want -- a certain lifestyle, basically -- is in New York and cannot be duplicated anywhere else.  At the same time, there's no shortage of answers as to who and the why. Answers sell books an
Read more

Bath Avenue Crew Rose High, Fell Hard

By Ed Scarpo
Image
This story from 2014 is one of the most popular on this site—and we didn't even know it until very recently (for reasons stemming from the fallibility of generalized analytics data.) Members of the Bath Avenue Crew were as young as 8 years old when they began to align themselves with the biggest, baddest gang in America: Cosa Nostra, specifically the Five Families. Bath Avenue Crew founding members. They saw the wiseguys on the street pulling up to the curbs in their big shiny Cadillacs, loafing around social clubs wearing pricey suits and sporting hundred-dollar haircuts and manicured fingernails. But the guys presented more than just a cold, distant image to watch; Mafia members interacted with the kids, joked around with them and showed them there were other ways to make it through life. The wiseguys doled out twenty-dollar bills like they were nothing. The wiseguys patted them on the back, told them they were "good kids," and maybe asked them to watch the cars
Read more

Some Wiseguys Are Brokesters Struggling to Pay Bills

By Ed Scarpo
Image
"Some mobsters reap millions from rackets, and in some cases from legitimate enterprises, but many struggle to maintain a middle-class existence, and some are routinely broke. The impoverished gangster barely eking out a living is so commonplace that mobsters have a word for these poorer men of honor: brokesters. "The archetypal Hollywood image of a wiseguy with prodigious appetites, swaggering in a finely tailored suit with a diamond pinkie ring and a fat roll of 50s, conceals the more nuanced reality of mob economics, according to some prosecutors, federal agents, organized-crime experts and a few mobsters. Crime figures are not immune to ordinary financial burdens and woes, like struggling to make car payments and finding money for groceries." N ew York Times reporter  William K. Rashbaum Jen Mascia, journalist and author. J ennifer Mascia wrote  Never Tell Our Business to Strangers , a coming of age book about a young girl with parents who are nickel-a
Read more